A man in a suit at an evening event, half-lit, the kind of photo you take when the interesting work happens in a warehouse nobody photographs.
He spent almost ten years handling INTURN's biggest accounts. Then he did the thing customer-success people almost never do: he bought the software he'd been serving.
CEO · INTURN · New York, NY
Thomas Zanetich runs INTURN, a New York enterprise software company that exists because of a fact retail would rather not dwell on: brands make more than they sell. Sneakers, jeans, snack bars, whatever it is, some meaningful slice of it ends up sitting in a warehouse, aging, tying up cash, and quietly costing money every day it doesn't move. INTURN is the system brands use to get rid of that surplus without wrecking the price of the things still on the shelf.
This is not a glamorous corner of technology. There is no consumer app, no viral moment. There is a spreadsheet problem the size of a continent, roughly $150 to $180 billion in value lost to excess inventory globally every year, and INTURN's pitch is that the spreadsheet problem is actually a margin opportunity if you handle it well. Normalize the inventory data. Automate how the excess gets packaged and offered. Route it to vetted buyers in private showrooms. Protect the brand and the pricing on the way out the door.
What makes Zanetich unusual is the path he took to the top of it. He is not the founder. INTURN was started in 2013 by Ronen Lazar and a co-founder, raised about $36 million including a $22.5 million Series B in 2017, and in late 2022 was absorbed by an AI company called Mad Street Den. Zanetich was there through all of it, first running client success for the marquee accounts, later carrying a retail-lead title on the acquirer's side. When the company came loose from that arrangement, the person who understood the customers best turned out to be the person who bought the whole thing.
So the org chart now reads like a small parable about loyalty and information. The people who founded INTURN built the asset. The person who serviced it for a decade knew exactly what it was worth, which accounts were solid, which were fragile, and what the platform could still do. He had, in the most literal sense, done the diligence by living it. Then he acquired it and made himself CEO, returning INTURN to independent ownership.
The framing Zanetich uses for customers is characteristically unsentimental. Excess inventory, he says, is not an if. It is a when. Every brand eventually gets stuck holding product it can't sell through normal channels, and the only real question is whether it has a plan for that day or scrambles. INTURN is the plan, sold as inevitability rather than aspiration, which is a smart way to sell software to people who don't want to admit they'll need it.
It helps to sit with what the product is actually doing, because the mechanics are more interesting than the category name. A brand like Nike or Levi's doesn't want a fire sale. A fire sale on last year's stock teaches customers to wait for the fire sale, which is how you train your own margins to collapse. The trick is to move the surplus quietly, to the right buyers, at prices that don't leak back into the channel and cannibalize full-price demand. That is a data problem and a discretion problem at the same time. INTURN's answer is private online showrooms: a seller opts in, a vetted buyer opts in, and only then do the two see each other. The whole architecture is built to make sure the wrong person never sees the wrong price.
Read the arc as a small M&A story and it gets even better. INTURN raised real venture money, hit the wall that a lot of enterprise software hits, and got acquired in 2022 by Mad Street Den, an AI company that wanted inventory workflow to sit inside its retail suite. Integrations like that are supposed to create synergy. Sometimes they just create a holding pattern. When the strategic logic cooled, the asset needed an owner who believed in it on its own terms, and the strongest believer available was the person who had spent a decade watching what it did for customers. He knew the churn risk, the renewal calendar, the accounts that would follow him and the ones that wouldn't. Buying a company you've serviced for ten years is about the least speculative acquisition a person can make.
So the honest one-line description of Thomas Zanetich is that he is an operator who priced an asset better than the market did because he had inside knowledge of the only kind that's legal to trade on: he understood the customers. There's no founder mythology here, no dorm-room origin, no pivot deck. There is a man who learned a boring, valuable business from the service side, waited for it to become available, and bought it. The category he sells into, retail's unsold billions, is not going away. Overproduction is baked into how consumer brands operate; they'd rather make too much than sell out and leave money on the table. As long as that's true, someone has to run the exit. Right now that someone owns the software.
Figures INTURN publishes for the results brands see when they run excess through the system instead of dumping it. Numbers are the company's own.
He said this to Food Dive, describing a surge of companies calling INTURN with "unprecedented levels of excess inventory."
Back in 2020, he noted, the company had already bet that supply-chain disruption and shifting demand would leave brands holding more than they could sell. The bet aged well.
Here is the thing that makes INTURN a durable business rather than a moment. Consumer brands deliberately make more than they can sell. It is cheaper to over-order and eat some surplus than to sell out early and forfeit the demand you didn't stock for. Empty shelves are a visible failure; a warehouse of leftovers is an invisible one. So the industry quietly chooses the invisible failure, over and over, at scale, forever.
That choice is where the $150 to $180 billion a year comes from. It's not fraud or incompetence. It's the arithmetic of how retail hedges against uncertainty, and the byproduct is a permanent river of unsold goods that has to go somewhere. Historically it went to off-price channels through opaque, relationship-driven deals that brands had almost no visibility into and even less control over.
Zanetich's company is a bet that the river can be plumbed. Give a brand a system of record for its excess, and the same discipline it applies to full-price selling can apply to the leftovers: real data, controlled distribution, protected pricing, an audit trail. The excess stops being an embarrassment handled in the shadows and becomes a line item you can actually manage. That reframing, from write-off to recoverable asset, is the entire product.
Take the messy, inconsistent inventory data brands actually keep and turn it into something a buyer can shop.
Package how excess products are managed, offered and sold, so the process isn't a manual scramble each season.
Run seller negotiations in one place with vetted buying partners, instead of scattered side deals.
Keep brand value and pricing integrity intact while the surplus leaves. That's the part that lets Nike be Nike.
Customer development and ecommerce roles at Unilever and Newell Brands. Studied at Colgate University.
Ronen Lazar and a co-founder start the excess-inventory software company in New York.
He comes into the "INTURN community," eventually running client success for enterprise brands like Nike, Levi's and KIND.
Led by B Capital Group, part of roughly $36 million raised since founding.
The AI company folds INTURN into its Vue.ai retail suite. Zanetich carries a North America retail-lead title.
After the transition, Zanetich acquires INTURN and becomes CEO, returning it to independent ownership.
INTURN's LinkedIn handle is still smart-skus, a fossil from its inventory-data origins.
The company sells against a $150-180 billion annual leak. That's not a market size guess; it's the estimated cost of stuff that simply didn't sell.
Zanetich's title publicly read "Sr. Director of Client Success" and, at one point, a headline claiming "CEO of INTURN." Both were true, years apart.
He reached the CEO seat without founding the company, a route through the customers rather than the cap table.
Thomas Zanetich is the CEO of INTURN, the New York enterprise software company that helps large consumer brands manage and sell off slow-moving and excess inventory. He spent close to a decade inside INTURN, most visibly running client success for accounts like Nike, Levi's and KIND, before acquiring the business and taking it back to independent ownership after its stint inside AI firm Mad Street Den. His pitch is unglamorous but real: the surplus goods piling up in warehouses are one of retail's most expensive problems, and there is money hidden in getting rid of them well.
Last updated: